Over dinner, she showed him what she’d found: a series of photographs of her computer monitors, hastily taken with her phone.

“I had to do it this way,” she said briskly. “I knew there’d be no trace of it afterwards.”

Julian frowned at the images. “Were you hacked?”

“I don’t think so. Not in the sense you mean. The opposite, maybe. I…think I was accessing a network.”

He squinted. “I give up. I have no idea what I’m looking at. Looks like Windows had a seizure.”

“That was kind of what it felt like,” she agreed, still so utterly calm that he knew something must be pinned down and thrashing beneath the surface. “I was…accessing something connected to it. I think something was trying to talk to my operating system in a way it could understand—talking down to it, if you like. And only half successfully, because there’s a lot of gibberish. But there’s…I think it’s doing my job for me. I think it’s sketching out connections I couldn’t see. Look, this is Cleary.” She was pointing at a photograph of her screen.

“How’s that Cleary?”

“It’s his social security number. Here I’m pulling back, and there’s White—and two dozen others. Those two who were at Khan’s place, more were from the greatgeorge site. I think.”

“You think?”

“Spiker, hold your horses, okay? It’s like it can see what I’m trying to do, what I’m trying to fit together, and it’s helping. Look, this is what happened after White’s details popped up.”

Julian blinked, still straining his eyes. “I just see numbers, and then lots of splats and spiders in ASCII.”

“These numbers map onto the registration of a group of companies. So it’s giving me identifiers that make sense to me, or that it thinks will.”

Julian polished off the last of his sauce with a mop of bread. It gave him time to think of a response that wouldn’t antagonize. “How did you work that one out?” he asked neutrally.

“Because I already knew to look, to follow the clues I was given.” She hesitated before continuing. “Because this isn’t the first time this happened to me. Before, I didn’t know there wouldn’t be any trace of the…incident, so I didn’t take photos, and I never told anyone. I hadn’t met you, then. There was nobody I trusted to tell. I thought I was going mad.”